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Originally posted by W. Luke
Actually the Mockup that I provided should be able to be seen by anyone whether they are a member or not. The ad is hardcoded. However it does require a Javascript and CSS enabled browser.

OK, if that is the case, it doesn't work for me on IE5 PowerMac 9600/300 MacOS 8.6. It works fine viewed in Mozilla 5.0 (0.9.2).

Yeah, believe it or not 10 seconds seems like a very long time. Maybe 5 seconds?

Free Content

Several people have conceded that "you can't expect people to provide content for free"........rubbish.

The net is (as you all know) founded on the free exchange of information. The commerce thing is still in it's infancy (just past its terrible two's I'd say ). I personally run two sites that are aimed at giving people INFORMATION about topics (Kickboxing and JuJitsu). I do this because I derive pleasure from exchanging the information, even though it costs me hosting charges yearly. There are millions of people out there that are happy to do the same thing with their particular areas of expertise. While that is the case, there will always be a free alternative to any site arrogant enough to believe its content has bought it some right over the behaviour of its users.

I have no problem with business ventures on the net - I have undertaken a few and am deveoping the area daily - but commerce is a small part of a very large internet. When sites are not making money, it is simply becuase they are approaching it the wrong way, and in some cases, simply because there is no real money to be made in that area.

Originally posted by zebz yuk i hate those popups we cannot close 10 seconds is too long when you want to read something behind the ad...

Normally I would agree with you. But look at the aspects of this ad and think of the possibilities.

1. It is specifically aimed at one sub-group of visitors. Guests. Members will never see it.
2. It has one goal in mind... Getting them to Register.
3. It has a fairly rare chance of occurance... 1 out of 30 chances on the Showthread page only. This will actually translate into more like 1 out of 50-60 page views because of the index page, forum display and search features.
4. It takes no space and adds less than a tenth of a second to the download time with gzip compression.

That said, I also think it would be more useful with a few other links running the bottom of the ad. The purpose is registratoin but I think you need to be able to provide the user with more detailed information (especially if it's their first time to the site).

Whatever. Just from my perspective (trying to put myself in a user's shoes), in 10 seconds I hardly have time to register all of what the ad says, never mind make a decision. I realise it will come up again if I continue to visit the forums...

I don't know, I guess that perhaps you could reset the timer and unveil a "close indow" button if the user shows interest in the popup (clicking somewhere) or even after that 10 seconds that way users get more out of the ad.

Re: Free Content

Originally posted by TheOriginalH The net is (as you all know) founded on the free exchange of information.

Originally started in 1969 by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the net consisted of just 4 computers linked together from different sites to exchange military research information. By 1972, the DARPANET had become the ARPANET and consisted of 37 computers. In 1983, MILNET was set up for the exclusive use of the military and the ARPANET began to be opened up to the world of universities and various scientific bodies. Essentially, the ARPANET can be viewed as the embryo from which the INTERNET grew.

Actually the Internet as we know it today is the Commercialization of a project created by the United States Military to keep information to themselves.

The Internet was found quite literally as a way to protect the secrets of the Military in that information could be transferred easily from Research Labs (US Universities .edu and US Military Contractors .com) to Military Installations (.mil) all with the oversight of Congress and the US Government (.gov).

It wasn't until much later (the project started in the 1969) that people started hitchhiking on this network to try and promote the free exchange of Information. Until the early to mid-90's the military was still in control of the project under the auspices of congress however they allowed universities around the world to share information freely because it provided a cover for their own research plus it helped reduce the costs because they weren't the only ones paying for equipment and maintenance anymore.

In 1984, the HTTP protocol was created. In the early 1990's Congress passed a law to allow the commercialization of the Internet which opened it up to the masses like we have today. At which time, ICANN was formed and given loose control over the DNS root files, the masters of which are still housed in computers located underneath the U.S. Congress Building. Shortly after that ICANN awarded the exclusive contract to Network Solutions to lease these domain names out to businesses and organizations so that individuals could fine them easily. And thus the first all Online Business was formed.

Never once was the true intent of the Internet to allow the free movement of information, it wasn't designed by feel good, do good scientists. It was designed by scientists who didn't want to lose their grant money because of war protestors on their University campuses and the great loss of information that these protestors could cause if they vandalized their labs.

I'd just like to say that the geeks at my university college have decided to filter ads out with the http proxy. They were also filtering out cookies for a while, spreading propaganda about how cookies were evil, etc.

Voluntarily blocking banner ads is one thing. Having them forcibly blocked by your ISP (in this case, the guys in charge here at college) is ridiculous.

Is there any legal action that can be taken against ISPs who remove banner ads from the pages before they reach clients?

I feel as if there's nobody I can talk to about this. How would I convince anyone that forcibly blocking banner ads is immoral? Fair enough, most webmasters know what I'm talking about, but nobody else does.

Pop-up or banner ads are useful if:
1) They complement rather than detract from the site they're on... i.e. SitePoint's banners, which actually have something to do with the content of the site.
2) They provide advertisers with viewers and customers.
3) They provide users with useful content.
4) They provide publishers with a way to make some extra money.

Therefore, we can conclude that:
1) Ads which say "WARNING! YOU HAVE AN EMAIL MESSAGE HONK HONK!" are bad.
2) Ads for Joe Schmoe's bar, grill, and university are not in a good place on a web hosting site.
3) Ads which spawn more windows and annoy the user are no good.

Well, I use ad blocking software so that I can still download my illegal warez and movies while DoSing my enemies' sites and cracking random servers, without my connection slowing down.

Er...I just have a question. Why would anyone want to block offline browsers? I just don't get it. I frequently run wget on my favorite sites to read them offline on my laptop outside, and I've run into a few sites who block wget (I can just set the user-agent to something different, though). It's just annoying.

I do run WebWasher just because I find popups and popunders incredibly annoying. I do set it to show ads from a select list of sites (including SP). But as of 3.0, you can set it to change your user-agent header to anything (I set it to the incredibly annoying <span style="display:none"> because I like the thought of log analyzers that don't strip HTML confusing webmasters, and because I am an evil person). What I'm trying to say in this pointless post is that ad blockers are not always bad.

Now, I might be biased just because I write content because I want people to learn from it and make the Internet and the world a better place - not because I want to make money (although that would be a nice side effect). I bet that most people and companies feel differently.

I'll end with a quote by Jan from that link you posted, aspen, that I think is completely 100% correct.

At the risk of being shot down in flames, I would like to ask what is more important? Surfers or bucks?

What you are doing is interfering with people's wishes to not view ads. That is their choice. If you force them to view them with these scripts, you are going to lose them and lose possible referrals to their friends who maybe don't have adblockers.

This is almost like cheating, but you are cheating the surfers. If I was using adblockers and I was still forced to view ads, I most certainly wouldn't return to that site.

If those unscrupulous ad companies hadn't come up with the 5-40 spawned popups maybe not so many people would be looking for alternatives.

I happen to be of a mind that advertisements do not belong on commerce oriented sites.

If I go to an online store to buy something, I don't want to see advertisements for outside companies. If the ads are for cross-selling and other items in that store, I can live with it. However if the ads are for outside sites, then there is a problem.

Content sites on the other hand have few if any other real choices at this time to make money so ads are necessary.

Same thing goes for television channels. I specifically pay extra for Starz! and expect to be able to not see any commercials.

However, I don't pay extra for the Discovery Channel as it is part of a large package. So I don't mind the commercials in their programs.

I personally feel that given the fact that eCommerce is on the rise, the future of making money with content-based sites is really going to be in affiliate programs (or maybe actually selling something from your site, or just accepting donations or something).

Delemtri, you have summarized this thread nicely, and Wayne has definetly clued us all in on some very interesting advertising methods.

However, I still think advertising in the banner format should be avoided (i.e. anything that looks like an animated gif) this is simply because the format has been destroyed by bad advertising, and has gained bad enough reputation to be ignored by users instinctivly.

Same thing with popups - I, among many others, have developed the popup-killer-finger, which is a reflex that closes any popups that I didn't open myself. Shooting a popup/puunder at a visitor with a trained killer-finger is a waste of bandwidth.

In Jakob Nielsens current list ofTop ten mistakes of web design number 10 is "anything that looks like advertising". His studies have shown that users acctually avoid (read: ignore) any elements that looks like a banner, animates, or pops up.

Er...I just have a question. Why would anyone want to block offline browsers? I just don't get it. I frequently run wget on my favorite sites to read them offline on my laptop outside, and I've run into a few sites who block wget (I can just set the user-agent to something different, though). It's just annoying.

I was one of those webmasters that would block offline browsers. Some people would use them to copy websites and use them for their own. I used to block wget also, because of this project ( www.grub.org ) however their crawler is a bit more friendly now so I have removed the block

Originally posted by qslack
Er...I just have a question. Why would anyone want to block offline browsers? I just don't get it. I frequently run wget on my favorite sites to read them offline on my laptop outside, and I've run into a few sites who block wget (I can just set the user-agent to something different, though). It's just annoying.

I would think this was a bandwidth issue, not only does it atke up lots of bandwisth its slows the site down in the process.

I don't block them on my site, but would nto hesiate to in a min, if I was worried to many people where doing it or I coudl actually be bothered to do it.